Emergency funding should start the process of remedying an emergency. It is with relief, therefore, that we hear Harriet Harman, Minister for Women, announce new funding of up to £1 million, dedicated in part to keeping rape crisis centres open. The New Statesman has recently joined with women’s organisations to call for such an initiative.

The crisis has been brewing for years. It is clear that something is terribly [...]

Harriet Stump was a 14-year-old domestic servant, working in Islington in 1880. A couple of weeks before Christmas, her employer burst into the room she was cleaning and, without a word, raped her. As Stump later testified in court, “he came and pushed me down on the sofa and pulled up my clothes, and put a cushion over my face, so that I could not holloo. He then put his [...]

For all its inhumanity, war is a profoundly human institution. Its ugliness can hardly be exaggerated. Men and women caught in the midst of the carnage have struggled to make sense of it. Young soldiers such as Arthur Hubbard, who served with the 1st London Scottish Regiment during the First World War, fractured psychologically under the strain of combat. On 7 July 1916, Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in [...]

On the evening of Sunday 30 October 1938, six million Americans sitting around their wireless sets heard some terrifying news: humanity was on the brink of annihilation. According to the CBS broadcast, the vanguard of an invading army had landed in the farmlands of New Jersey and was moving steadily across the continent. More than one million Americans panicked. Friends and relatives were telephoned and warned of the impending calamity. [...]

Evil is not banal. Quite the contrary: it infuses every aspect of the society from which it is born. This is the timely message of these two books. Both authors have established reputations in the field of genocide: Wolfgang Sofsky has written a much-lauded book on Nazi concentration camps, while Samantha Power is an accomplished reporter and founding executive director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. [...]

In a villa, by a lake, 15 educated and competent bureaucrats sat down to establish certain principles that would dictate when and in what order millions of innocent people would be slaughtered. Less than 90 minutes later, they could be found relaxing in front of a fire with a glass (or more) of cognac. The meeting was held in secret inside a luxurious villa in Berlin, on the tranquil shores [...]